Molecular Advancements in Soybean Seed Quality and Diversity: A Review

As a leguminous crop, soybean is an important to the economy. Progress in soybean genetics has been focused on producing types that are tolerant or resistant to different biotic and abiotic problems, increasing seed and oil output, and optimizing cropping system fit. Conventional breeding strategies have been employed by plant breeders to enhance these attributes in soybeans. Traditional breeding can be greatly accelerated by the use of genomic and molecular techniques. In soybean breeding, molecular markers have shown to be an invaluable new tool that may quickly and reliably increase selection efficiency. An overview of the molecular approaches is presented in this paper that has been recently used in "omics" research and marker assisted selection for the genetic enhancement of soybean seed quality standards.